Very briefly—and I think this will answer Mr. Storseth's question about pilots and flight attendants, because we're in the same aircraft—in June 2002 there was a tail strike of an airline in Frankfurt. A flight attendant was improperly in the cockpit. She was traumatized by the incident, because the pilot said “we're going to crash”. She went off sick. She has never returned to work.
The pilots completed an air safety report under the no-discipline policy that is part of SMS. We don't have any problem with not being disciplined, but that report was never provided to the occupational health and safety committee. Air Canada appealed a direction, supported by ACPA, whereby we would not know the information the pilots provided. That is the issue of excessive secrecy that we attempt to distinguish.
Non-punitive reporting is fine, but when stuff becomes confidential and secret so that you cannot do investigations, that is a dysfunctional safety culture, wherein the airline or the pilot can hold stuff and we cannot access it.
If you can fix that—and we've offered you recommendations—I think we can go a long way towards addressing what Mr. Storseth was concerned about. As a very simple example, a concrete example, we have now been two and a half years in litigation over getting that pilots' report so that we could complete an investigation.
And having to force that flight attendant to relive her testimony—and Air Canada said it was never an accident.... It was a category B, with $10 million damage to the plane, and they won't share a report? What is wrong with that picture? That is not SMS; that is secrecy.